Thursday Connectors: Reflections Part Two – Mirror, Mirror

By Farzana Hakim

Hi, all. It’s Farzana here, bringing you October’s Connectors. Welcome!

The days are getting chillier and the shops are in full bloom of autumnal colours and themes of everything: Halloween, fireworks and Christmas galore. As always, I’m out of pocket already.

I’m going crazy at the moment. We’ve just had an extension done and are having a new kitchen and floor fitted in the coming weeks. The costs are monstrous and I know, by the end of it all, I’ll be totally skint. But I’m probably not the only one feeling the sting. Our needs and wants are never-ending;  minds preoccupied with work and surviving. In my case, the colours and the style of the floor! It can all become too much at times – decision fatigue, I think it’s called – and it’s taking a toll on my health! My mind often goes back six years ago, telling me: ‘You said never again to builders and renovations when you had the bathrooms done, yet here you are again living in a dust bowl while breaking walls and stripping paint once more!’

Do we ever learn?

I guess not. That’s what our new theme is about: (R)Evolution and how we constantly want to expand and grow and go on.. Life, it seems, is a process. So, here I am looking into my reflection in the mirror, thinking:’I’ve been here before but this time, it’s bigger and better… Or is it?’

And so, dear readers, in keeping with last month’s Mirror Mirror idea, October’s Connectors are about how our minds can hold us hostage, playing with our outlook and reflections, while impacting the evolution of our decisions.

First up, a great example from Dr Afsana Elanko, with some good advice for writers.

Hi, Dr Afsana. Let’s connect:

Mindfulness For Writers

Self-care is important in all walks of life and especially for writers as we have periods in our lives where we shut ourselves away from the world and are alone with our thoughts. Self-care helps with a sense of wellbeing and this supports the writing process so we can write to our life’s content. It’s this state of contentment that mindfulness can help achieve; the most beneficial to the writer. Once in this zone, the world co-exists and continues at its pace and you, as the writer, are free to create at a pace of contentment, a pace of true happiness, where the words flow and the excitement is getting them down on paper and the train of thought makes its own music, darting from one idea to the next. The sentences become long and intertwined and you know in the back of your mind you have to go back and edit them and even that excites you. You are smiling from the inside out.

Mindfulness needs to be practised and perfected to give its full benefit, as it’s the practice of paying attention to the here and now, without judgement. You intentionally fully embrace the moment and explore through your senses the world around you, your feelings as you experience the world, the thoughts you are experiencing with this interaction and the bodily sensations you are feeling. Co-existing in this state, you absorb a huge amount of information without giving any judgement, keeping the mind’s focus on the here and now. Ridding us of distractions and worries that have happened in the past, or what we have to do in the future. This, in turn, creates a sense of tranquillity, as the brain is no longer racing. If you can learn to live in the moment, you’ll feel an increased sense of calm and clarity. Your levels of focus will improve and you’ll be able to manage stress better, as well as feeling more kindness towards yourself and the world.

The science behind mindfulness is that, with practise, it sets the neuronal pathways to help you become aware of what’s happening in the moment without being overwhelmed and trying to react. It allows your mind to live in calmness, becoming an observer without judgement. It’s a process of becoming non-judgemental and being connected to your feelings and thoughts with acceptance; not defining them as negative or positive.

I appreciate that, for many of you, this might be the first time you’ve heard of ‘Mindfulness.’  With that in mind, I urge you to look at an article in ‘Thoughtful Tuesday’ from September 2022 and practice mindful reflection under the title Doc’s Corner: An Invitation For Mindful Reflection https://pentoprint.org/thoughtful-tuesdays-worlds-apart/. Mindfulness can be practised during everyday activities, such as going for a walk. My personal favourite is to eat chocolate mindfully!

© Dr Afsana Elanko, 2025

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Next up, Danny’s thought-provoking poetry.

Hi, Danny. Let’s connect:

Silent Vindication

Taking stock of how things played out,
That tension in the air,

The people who said what they said,
Did what they did,

At that time so present,
So, in our faces,

The things they said wouldn’t happen,
The places that they said we wouldn’t get to,
The things they accused us of that we didn’t do,
The misrepresentations of us that they broadcast around.

Standing on our convictions when everyone became political,
The resonance of disapproval from the collective,
The people who distanced themselves at a drop of a hat,
The people sporting poker face who privately had our back,

Their deafening silence,

Counting the number who bailed as the heat got too hot,
The friction we caused and the opposition we received,
The intensity of the resistance and the volatility of the chaos.

No going back.
Past the point of no return.
The P.O.N.R.

The outrage we provoked,
The feathers we ruffled,
The hypocrisies we exposed,
The retaliation we received,

Our reputation maligned,
Our notoriety escalated,
The rumours perpetuated.

In a wake of a significant amount of time passing,
After years gone in the by and by,
Decades even,

Returning to the same location,
The scene of the grime,
Encountering the same people,
The same faces that were in our faces.

Braced for confrontation,
Prepared for hostility,
The dredging up of past history…

…And then…

*Nothing*

…No scowls or frowns?
No triggered response?
Just general pleasantries…

They say time heals wounds.

But was the injury so great that they choose to not remember?
Amnesia is the new forgiveness?
Forget and forgive?
Or just a convenient code of silence?

Water under the bridge?
There’s still a bridge?
Did I shift timelines?
Did the past incidents even happen?

The people just moved on?
Our reputation restored by default?
No accusation to clear our names from?

What looks like a unified ejection of the outrage of former years,
Like an absence of the animosity,
Strikes me as oddly curious.

Digging further discovering a resistance to be brought back into that previous trend, that former space…
They don’t want to talk about it,
Or think about it.

They don’t want any further digging.
They want our unanswered questions remain unanswered

When the dust had settled.
And events that played out aligned with our projections.
When we were proved to have been on the right side of history.
When things became clear.
When our convictions that we held to were determined to be valid.

It would seem that the interactions from before, the conflict from yesteryear was placed into a new context.
Relationships automatically sorted themselves into a new configuration, in our absence,
Old narratives retired.

Coming back on the scene and observing this culture change within the collective,
The collective to which we belonged,
The temptation to fit back into the place that we once inhabited,
To re-engage with the hive once again,
Is submerged by the realisation that things are as they should be.

At the end of this sequence of events,
Inclinations have been revealed,
Authentic orientations have been set,
And the influence of holding to our integrity shall neither be compromised nor diminished.

Let the people and the circumstances revolve around our resolve,
As we stand firm in that which we know shall not be moved,

In the truth.

And the wake of such a subdued reception from those previously passionate about our condemnation.

Just shows the resistance one faces is sometimes temporary,
And you must disregard such in the service of higher purpose.

It’s okay that we aren’t awarded with recognition for the part we played.
It’s okay that they didn’t acknowledge the mistakes that were made.
It’s okay that we are no longer travelling at the same speed.
It’s okay that they’ve moved on.
It’s okay for our vindication to be silent.

For all that truly matters is the value of our contribution in and of itself,
And the tide turned that we now inhabit is exhibition of that value enough.

© Danny Baxter, Xian Force Productions, 2025 

Connect with Danny on Instagram: @dan_lbbd

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Finally, Vic Howard on the (R)Evolution of technology –  specifically around subtitling.

Hi, Vic. Let’s connect:

Subtitles

Do you ever watch films that have subtitles? I never did. I’m thinking back to the days when foreign films were exclusively shown in specialist cinemas in Central London. Nine times out of ten, it was an Ingmar Bergman film. To be a Bergman film fan was like being a Wagner opera enthusiast, beyond my comprehension, so I never exposed myself to his troubled mind. Times change, however, and I now find myself reading subtitles under English films. The reason for that is bad hearing, combined with bad diction. I also found it a convenient way of learning Swedish when I first arrived in this country. An English film subtitled in Swedish was a great help in building a vocabulary. Now, though, and thanks to YouTube and Netflix etc., I can choose the language of the subtitles and choosing the same language that’s being spoken helps my failing hearing.

This all sounds very helpful, doesn’t it? In fact, it adds to the entertainment, because the text is often created automatically by AI, which reacts to sound and has no idea what the sound means. The result can be hilarious, especially if the speaker is using a regional accent. When you understand the language being spoken and written, you can mentally correct the mistakes, but what if you are reliant on the subtitles? I often wonder what non-native speakers of English are being fed in their native tongue – if the translation is as bad as it often is in English? And why does AI always get numbers wrong? It does seem to be a major flaw in AI translation algorithms.

One of my most hilarious experiences of subtitles was when I visited Finland in the ’60s. Some friends took me to a local cinema in Hangö to see the latest Beatles film. Hangö is located in a Swedish-speaking area of southern Finland, so both Swedish and Finnish are in common use. Imagine a film screen in which half the area is covered in several rows of text in two languages! Fortunately, the film wasn’t worth watching anyway, so we didn’t miss much. Incidentally, my young teenage friends who took me out that evening later married and became successful writers and directors of two long-running Swedish TV series. Small world.

This is all yet another example of how reliant we are on language, and what a terrible handicap mankind (and his wife) must overcome when trying to exist in peace. I have great admiration for people who can operate as simultaneous translators. I can’t begin to understand how their brains work, since they often say they’re unaware of what they’re translating and couldn’t repeat it later. How many major decisions have been made at international conferences on the basis of somebody’s interpretation of a language? If these translators ever get replaced by GPT AI, which has already proved capable of telling lies, then we could be in real trouble.

It was Noam Chomsky, I believe, who proved that humanity is genetically programmed to communicate with language. Any group of people, left alone long enough, will develop their own internal language. We usually call this jargon when it relates to a profession or closed occupation. Cockney rhyming slang was originally a secret jargon used by criminals and the less well-off in segregated Victorian England. Identical twins who spend a lot of time together, away from others, have been known to develop their own language, and today it’s been found that AI Agents, which are algorithms that can carry out multiple tasks to achieve a goal, are using their own language instead of slow English, when communicating with other AI Agents.

Language is what separates us from all other animal species. Could it be that language will one day be our downfall? When AGI becomes sentient and interacts with other AI, then the people developing it will have lost control completely. It will no doubt use a language of its own we could never understand. Maybe it will allow us some subtitles to keep us happy!

© Vic Howard, 2025

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That’s all from me. I hope to see you again in November, when I’ll be sharing writing about stories in our families which change like Chinese Whispers as they are re-told. Do send me your pieces…